WD today announced that it has added the USB 3.0 interface to its line of My Passport for Mac portable hard drives and increased their storage capacity up to 2TB. The company also announced the release of their new My Book VelociRaptor Duo desktop drive for Mac users. This drive features two 1TB 10,000 RPM WD VelociRaptor drives along with dual Thunderbolt ports for ultra fast data transfer rates.

My Book VelociRaptor Duo provides ultimate speed and performance with two 1 TB 10,000 RPM WD VelociRaptor drives along with two Thunderbolt ports. The 2 TB dual-drive storage system is ideal for editing high resolution video, 3D rendering, graphic design, and other demanding digital media applications. This boost in performance delivers solid state drive (SSD) -like data transfer rates of up to 400 MB/s for greater work-flow productivity. The dual-drive storage system offers RAID 0 for performance or RAID 1 for protection; and the twin Thunderbolt ports offer daisy-chaining multiple My Book VelociRaptor Duo drives and other high performance peripherals without impacting data transfer speeds or performance. The My Book VelociRaptor Duo also comes complete with a Thunderbolt cable in the box and is user-serviceable.

Pricing for the new My Passport for Mac portable hard drives start at $99.99. The My Book VelociRaptor Duo desktop drive is priced at $899.99.

Yes, good to see.
I've purchased WD externals in the past, that I returned because they were annoying to use with my Mac. Hopefully these models work well. If not, there are plenty of alternatives... LaCie, G-Drives etc.

I've always been a fan of the MyBook drives. I've owned three and they have all served me well. I sure would love to get my hands on the VelociRaptor drive with Thunderbolt. It must perform like a beast. That being said, I wonder how loud those 10,000 RPM drives actually are? I hate having extra noisy products on the desktop. All of my gear now is so quiet.

I've always been a fan of the MyBook drives. I've owned three and they have all served me well. I sure would love to get my hands on the VelociRaptor drive with Thunderbolt. It must perform like a beast. That being said, I wonder how loud those 10,000 RPM drives actually are? I hate having extra noisy products on the desktop. All of my gear now is so quiet.

I should note, that it was a Passport drive that I returned and I did so because the built in firmware would automatically mount the drive when plugged in. This is normal, the issue is if I ejected the drive, the firmware would automatically remount the drive. There was no way to unmount the drive.
The other two issues I had were.
Controller was integrated into the drive. Not a big deal, but I prefer them to be modular, incase the drive fails, or if I want to put in a bigger drive down the road. Again not a big issue given the enclosure is cheap.

The other issue I had was there was no way of getting rid of the built in back-up software that came with the drive. Again this was built into the firmware. Formatting the drive did no good.

So having a drive insist on mounting and running back-up software that I didn't want to use, really wasn't what I was looking for.

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I also had a MyBook. It was decent, but the drive failed.

I still purchase Western Digital internal drives, but I shy away from their drive/enclosures. For me there are too many easily accessible alternatives.

That being said I'm not anti Western Digital. They make good products, but Macs haven't really been their focus (I'm glad to see these drives are made for Mac). Cheap consumer drives with cheap enclosures, that you can pick up at Costco, BestBuy etc. have been their focus. Although I use my home computer for personal average user stuff, I like to buy higher end products. ie. Nikon DSLR, Apple Cinema Display, LaCie drives, Klein tools etc. The only reason I bought Western Digital drives were because they were cheap and Costco sold them. Too bad they never worked out for me.

I've always had good luck with WD and Hitachi drives. It's Seagate that has let me down on more than one occasion. I also had a portable 500GB FreeAgent drive from them fail on me after about a year. So I would be more than willing to give these WD drives a look. I mean, when it comes to the portable models. I sure as sh*t can't afford the one with Thunderbolt.